In the spirit of Community Engagement Day 2019, and with a freshly minted new year in front of us, we’re thinking about how a shared understanding and appreciation of community engagement across all teams can strengthen organisations and improve their connection with the community.

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Imagine if your organisation had just one person who was fantastic at customer service. Would you just hand off all customer-service related tasks to them? Would you write off customer service as being ‘their job’ and their job alone?

Of course not: you’d strive to upskill the rest of your team and ensure that everyone understands both the importance and the fundamental skills of customer service. That’s because good customer service has long been considered a core value across governments, even for staff members who don’t directly engage with the public.

We like to think of community engagement as ‘the new customer service’. It’s not just for a small group of individuals within an organisation - it’s for everyone that interfaces with the public.

The rise of digital community engagement tools and platforms mean governments are engaging more than ever, as wide-ranging and comprehensive processes are becoming more cost-effective and efficient. This is in line with trends towards wider democratisation of data, knowledge and participation that we see happening in governments around the world.

Communities now expect to be well-informed and meaningfully consulted on any decisions that affect the way they live, work and move. This means team members or decision-makers who work on these projects need to understand how community engagement works, why it is important and how their roles feed into the process.

If you are working in an organisation that engages with the public, ask yourself: how informed is the whole team about your engagement strategy and how collaborative are your engagement processes? Does the person with sharp web skills understand community engagement? Does the person who needs their engagement delivered online have fundamental web skills? Do managers have the skills to confidently approve and interpret the results of an online engagement?

The skills required for good community engagement are diverse, and project managers need to build a coalition of skills to plan, design, deliver and analyse a community engagement project.

Here are some tips for organisations looking to maximise the value of their community engagement projects.

  1. Involve everyone - When an engagement is being planned, anyone involved with the planning, execution and analysis of the project should be in the room together. No one should just be ‘handed’ a project and told to “just put it online.” Teams must acknowledge their shared ownership and responsibility for a project, and communicate and collaborate accordingly.

  2. Demonstrate the value of engagement - Look to some of the many best-practice-beating examples of online, offline and hybrid community engagement projects being undertaken around the world right now. This is an exciting time to be working in community engagement, with a great deal of innovation and creativity taking place. Showcase the available tools so team members know what’s possible and can broaden their expectations. Help people understand the kind of data and methods for data collection that are now possible, and how that data can be used to secure better outcomes for the community.

  3. Encourage everyone to embrace community engagement - Teams need to talk about community engagement as a fundamental task that everyone can and should feed into. Embracing community engagement as a concept goes a long way towards securing buy-in across the organisation and setting the scene for good engagements and high quality data collection.

  4. Provide training and upskilling opportunities - Community engagement is now a useful string to everyone’s bows. A planner who understands best practice community engagement design - particularly online - is a valuable asset to a team. A communications person with community engagement skills can help join the dots between theory and implementation. A web person who can design community engagement experiences and interpret the results can help teams get the best out of their online engagements. Everyone has a role to play if you let them access those skills.


We believe good community engagement has the ability to positively impact the way people live, foster stronger communities and build trust between government. To do that, governments need to encourage team members to share skills, break-down what were once specialist disciplines, and collaborate to create integrated and effective community engagement processes.

Community engagement isn’t just for the specialists anymore – it’s for everyone.